The startled azure eyes fixed on his face suggested their owner was just as surprised to see him as he was to see her—so this wasn’t an engineered meeting …
That had been his initial assumption, and Rafiq still reserved judgement. He had been frequently pursued over the years, and the women who set their sights on him constantly managed to surprise him with their ingenuity—not to mention their acting ability.
His vanity, or lack of it, was such that he didn’t imagine for one second that it was his personal magnetism that made these women humiliate themselves by going to such embarrassingly elaborate lengths to gain his attention. It was his title, his position that attracted them. The old adage that power was a strong aphrodisiac was not far from the mark.
He had occasionally wondered in the past if he would ever find a woman who wanted him and not what he represented, or even wanted him despite what he represented.
Those thoughts had never gone beyond casual speculation, because he had always known that in reality his choice of bride would be a political decision, not a romantic one. His own parents’ marriage had been such a one, and despite a considerable age-gap the marriage had been a success. They both respected one another, and neither had entered into the arrangement with any false expectations.
The union had produced two sons, and had done much to negate the political fallout from his father’s first marriage. That marriage had been a love-match—not in itself a problem, but King Zafir’s first wife’s inability to supply him with an heir had been. When the King had steadfastly refused to put aside the love of his life, the monarchy that had lasted so many generations had been in real danger. Then, against all the odds, the Queen had conceived, but the country’s and the King’s delight had been short-lived. Queen Sadira had gone into premature labour and died of complications. The baby—a boy—had died a week later.
By all accounts his father had been almost mad with grief, and without his powerful hand at the reins the country had divided into warring factions. It had been a time of deep political unrest.
Rafiq had never been able to imagine the man he knew today being so blindly besotted that he’d put romantic love ahead of duty. Even less could he imagine himself repeating that mistake.
Now, of course, the subject was irrelevant. For him there would be no marriage, no wife and no future.
Cutting short this line of thought before he became lost in a morass of despondency, Rafiq dragged a hand though his hair, smoothing the dark strands into the nape of his neck. A frown of distaste drew his brows into a straight line. He despised self-pity in himself even more than in others.
Besides being a pointless emotion, it smacked of self-indulgence—more productive by far to focus on things he could control. Like the blonde …
The blonde whose astonishing neon blue eyes had not yet left his face.
She really was not the sort of woman you would miss in a crowd—not with those eyes and that head of decadent blonde curls that spilled down her back, framing a vivid little face that reminded him of a Titian portrait. But below the neck, he decided, staying with the art analogy, she was pure Degas. Her slim, supple and gently rounded body might have belonged to one of that artist’s ethereal ballet dancers.
She looked like a wilted rose, with her grubby face and the purple smudge of exhaustion beneath her eyes. She was the delicate, petite type of female that aroused the protective instinct in a lot of men.
Rafiq’s assessing glance drifted from her stubborn chin and defiant, wary eyes to the pouting lower lip, and he thought they would be the same men who failed to notice that she had stroppy written all over her.
She began to struggle to her feet. Rafiq noted the tremor in the hand that reached to clutch for support and extended his own. She looked at it for a moment with the sort of enthusiasm that most people reserved for a striking snake, then deliberately ignored it, carrying on struggling.
Rafiq withdrew his hand and with a derisive shrug made no further attempt to help her, even though she looked about as weak and shaky as a newborn kitten.
He liked independent women—but not when they felt the need to make pointless displays of self-sufficiency.
Gretchen, his lover for twelve months previous to their non-acrimonious split in May, was a highly independent-minded woman, who made no apologies for being ambitious, but she took the little courtesies offered by a man as her due.
Gretchen was a divorce lawyer based in Paris; before her there had been Cynthia, a fashion designer in Milan—long-distance relationships, with women who’d wanted what he did: sex. Not casual, anonymous sex, but sex that came with no emotional strings attached.
Rafiq had never understood why people felt long-distance love affairs put a strain on relationships. For him, the arrangement was perfect. It made it easier to compartmentalise his personal and public life. He never had unrealistic calls on his time when he had duties to perform, there were no draining emotional melodramas, and there were no outside distractions—just mutually satisfying sex.
He was not even sure why he and Gretchen had split up. She was everything he wanted in a woman—totally self-absorbed, of course, but that had its advantages, and she didn’t make small talk.
Gretchen hadn’t changed, so why had boredom and dissatisfaction set in?
There was never more than one woman in his life at a time, but there generally was one. Sex was important—or it had been! He had put this barren period in his love life down to a jaded appetite. Had his life acquired a certain cyclical predictability? Was the effort worth the reward? But now, for the first time, he was confronted by the possibility that his recent loss of libido might be another insidious symptom of the disease that was robbing him of his future, of the opportunity to decide that he wanted the emotionally draining drama he had been actively avoiding.
He looked at the blonde’s mouth and felt his body stir lustfully—and thought maybe not …
He had never been attracted to women who treated their femininity like an affliction, and he got the distinct impression this woman would take it as an insult if a man opened a door for her. She looked all prickles, aggression, and pink sulky lips, he decided, his critical gaze lingering longer than was polite on those lips.
In short, not his type—physically or otherwise. But by anyone’s standards she’d definitely fulfil the role of distraction.
It would be a simple matter to have her removed, and that was clearly the logical course of action, but curiosity won out over practicality. How did a blue-eyed blonde come to be in here?
He recognised it was a very poor piece of prioritising, but at that moment this was the mystery that had captured his total attention—maybe he was attracted by its light relief value?
He searched his brain for a plausible explanation for her presence and came up empty. There simply wasn’t one. True, tourism was a developing industry in Zantara, but to his knowledge they had not begun offering escorted tours of the palace.
His father was in many ways a moderniser, but the mental image of curious camera-clicking crowds being shown around the King of Zantara’s private apartments caused the corner of Rafiq’s stern mouth to twitch.
Gabby was conscious of his intense scrutiny—she now understood why people spoke of feeling someone’s eyes.
Reluctant to reveal her weakened condition to this stranger, she surreptitiously leaned her elbow against an armoire set against the wall. Being a fugitive was certainly exhausting!
It wasn’t just her reluctance to show vulnerability that had made her reject his offer of assistance. She couldn’t explain it, but the idea of those long brown fingers touching her … She frowned and shook her head, confused by the violence of her gut rejection.
The sound of his bitter-chocolate voice made her jump.
‘You are well?’
She tilted her head. He